The Lazy Days of Summer 3: Flag Day

Good evening everyone!

Before I'm ending up being too tired again to write a short blog post, I quickly want to show you my design for the third theme of the summer challenge. This one was not as easy for me as for a lot of other ladies. I don't like the colors of the German flag very much, the Japanese one appeared a little bit too easy, but I'm also not very attached to the American flag. Most did this theme around July 4th, so it was not unsurprising to see a lot of American themed manis. So here I was sitting, thinking of some flag to be my inspiration.

In the end, I got my inspiration when I took my dog for a walk. We always come by this office building that has three flags put up in front of the building. One being the European, one the German and the last being the Hassian flag. Hassia is the federal state I'm living in. I'm not doing that flag... it's just as "difficult" as the Japanese one. But I started thinking about using my city's flag for this manicure.

So here is my city's flag. Blue background with a lion in red and white. The golden french is supposed to represent the golden crown that should be in this very spot. Since my nails are too short right now, I didn't have enough room to paint one anymore, haha.

I used Catrice Pool Party at Night as my base color. I still love this polish a lot. I just wished it was a liiiittle bit more purple toned and it would be one of those shades tha I'm still looking for...

Anyway, when that was dry, I got my white acrylic paint and tried painting that lion. That was such a pain in the ass. The proportions are still off, but that's the best I could do. I'm really thinking about getting some high end white acrylic paint. I need it to be opaque immediately for those tiny things. I always end up messing up my details, when I have to layer the acrylics...The red is red acrylic paint. Probably the shade I use the least, hehe.

I finished with a golden french using my revell email color. Yeah, still not healthy to use, but it's just the french... I love how opaque it is though.

What do you think of my cute little lion?

Oh, and did I mention that my nails broke again? Like how can they break when they are this short!? But they did... :((

And here's the list of all the lovely ladies participating in this challenge:

Victoria @ Manicurator

Alyson @ BEADS. NAILS. FOOD.

Mandy @ Mandy's Polish

Hannah @ Polished Prisms

Sue @ Creative Nail Design by Sue

Katee @ A Girl and Her Polish

Charlotte-Louise @ Charlotte's Nails

Karine @ Karinea0a

Jen @ The Polished Zombie

Jessica @ Jessica's Nail Tales

Ashley @ One Nail to Another 

Pryanka @ Nail Sparks*

Anna @ Polished Cousins

Maribeth @ Obsessive Cosmetic Hoarders Unite!

Sharra @ The Blahg

Stephanie @ A Little Polish

Amanda @ Counting Down to Bliss

Jess @ NearlyNaturalNails 

Heidi @ DIY Polish 

Becky @ Glamfiend

The Lazy Days of Summer 2: Summer Ombre

Hi everyone~

I hope you're having a great weekend! Mine is almost over and it was sooooo short. But there's only three weeks left until my one-week vacation, yay.

Anyway, today I'm going to show you my Summer Ombre, second theme of the Summer challenge I'm participating in. I didn't do anything fancy this time. This is actually the first real ombre mani I did... hard to believe. I hadn't worn any orange in a while, so the color was decided. I didn't have much trouble finding some maching colors in my stash of untrieds. This is basically why I didn't do anything fancy... I wanted to use this mani to "swatch" a few of my untrieds. So glad I did...

For this mani, I picked only one polish that I had used before. It's the one on my middlefinger. It looks kind of pastel compared to the others, but be assured, it's absolutely not.

Pinky: unnamed beauty uk polish
Ring: OPI The "IT" Color
Middle: p2 notice me
Pointer: depend 124
Thumb: MNY 343

I wish there were more names, not only numbers. It's so hard to picture a polish just by some number.

The two yellow polishes were kind of sheer, but the beauty UK build nicely... not the OPI though. I think I did 5 coats to achieve the kind of opacity I was looking for. It turned out way more orange than it looks in the bottle too. I knew though, because I swatched them on a piece of paper beforehand. The OPI was very slow drying and of course, I smudged it.

The two yellow's glow very nicely in direct sunlight though, don't you think?

The two orange shades were what I expected. Three coats for the p2, two for the depend. I don't own many depend polishes, but the few I have are really opaque. I just wish the bottles were a bit bigger...

The orange on my thumb was a bit of a surprise too. Just like the OPI, it turned out way darker than it looks in the bottle. It's bordering to a light red in my opinion. I do like the shade though. It's a shame that MNY is no longer available in Germany. Can you still buy it somewhere else in Europe? That would be interesting.

That's it for my Summer Ombre. It was fun to do and I can see why people like ombre manis. For me, it is probably a little too undemanding. My colleagues even commented that this was a very unusual mani for me, haha. I like gradients better, so I'll stick with those when I don't feel like painting or sticking loads of pearls and rhinestones to my nails. ;)

essence - Oh My Glitter!

Hi everyone,

this week, while I was killing some time until I met one of my former flatmates, I spotted the new essence color&go nail polish range. I was both delighted and displeased by this. Delighted, of course, because it's always great to see new polishes... displeased, because this meant that I had missed the clearance sale. Boo.

Anyway, I got myself two of the new polishes. One of them, I wore the next day and I want to show you a few swatches. This new shade is called Oh My Glitter!. It's a pretty purple, quite bright, infused with tiny pink and blue flecks. In the store the pink looked rather orange to me and it still did in certain lighting, but it really is pink. No way I could have stopped myself from buying this one. It's purple and has flecks after all.

Oh My Glitter! is a little sheer, so I'm wearing three thin coats here. Maybe I was a little bit too quick with my application, but with the first two coats I had some dragging issues that smoothed out with the third.

Drying time itself was not bad. I have to compare, but it might be a little faster than the previous formula. I took my pictures right after painting my nails too catch the last rays of sunlight for the day. I often manage to smudge my pinky while taking pictures, but when I went outside it was apparently dry enough for this not to happen this time.

I tried to catch the pink shimmer, but it is hard with my camera. The macro is just not the best. The blue is impossible to photograph, I believe, it's even hard to see with bare eyes. But it is there and gives some depth to the polish.

As always, the caps are supposed to show you how the polish looks like. On the first picture you can see the pink shimmer on the cap and that's how the polish actually looks like. It's no unique shade, but a pretty one.

With the new range of nail polishes, essence also introduced a new bottle shape. Each bottle now contains 8ml instead of the former 5ml. I'm not sure I like this new shape... I found it a bit difficult to hold while taking pictures, but I might get used to that. The bottle is kind of cute though.

There's one more novelty regarding the new range - a new brush. I never thought the old one was bad, but it sure was different than all the wide brushes that we recently see. essence decided they need a new brush too, so here it is.

It's actually two small brushes positioned close together to form their new professional brush. It does capture more polish than the old one, but it is much bigger, so that's to be expected. I can finish one coat on most of my nails with two brush strokes, but I think that you easily get too much polish on the brush. If that happens you do even more strokes to get it off. Not so great. But I had the same problem with the new Catrice brushes and quickly got a hang of how to deal with it.

All in all, the new range is nice, but there are not as many new shades that wowed me as last time. It's bright and colorful, loads of polishes that seem perfect for summer - if there was summer here. I'm a bit confused whether this is their fall/winter range or not. For my taste, it is way to bright to be such. We will see. Maybe there will be so many LE's or TE's this fall/winter that you won't even notice the core range to be too colorful!? No idea.

What do you think? Have you tried some of the new polishes by chance? Do you like the new bottle shape?

essence - forget-me-not plus glitter

Hi everyone!

Remember when I wrote that my router died and I didn't have any access to the internet? That's when I was going through my pictures and worked on a few of my oldies to finally publish them. Today, I want to show you one of those manicures... basically from the vault, because I don't even remember when I did this manicure. March, maybe?

Anyway, I remember that I picked a polish from my growing stash of untrieds: essence forget-me-not from last year's spring collection. At first I wasn't very fond of the collection, except for the yellow (love it!), but I ended up getting the whole collection later on. Around Christmas I also bought a lot of glitters that were just as "untried". So here's a combination of forget-me-not with an iridiscent glitter.

The glitter is basically white but depending on the light it looks lilac or teal. I though why not try it over a purple polish. The pictures actually don't do it any justice. It looked awesome, though I have to practice the application of loose glitters like that. My pinky got a bit overloaded, hehe.

I remember that this mani made me think of mermaids a lot. Probably because the glitters looked like fish scales. I need to see if these glitters are melting in polish or not. They might be nice to franken.

And one more... a somewhat unfocused close-up, just because it looked so sparkly.

That's it for today~